The Sales Funnel

The Funnel starts with your Ad or other type of marketing outreach.

The visitor clicks through to a landing page (or an authority site home page). With your Ad and landing page you are making some kind of FREE, VALUE OFFER. An ebook or a video course, although there are other ideas and choices. In order to receive the gift, the visitor leaves their email at least, and probably name and possibly other info if there is a reason for it. This is called OPT-IN and this gets them into your EMAIL LIST. You'll need a service, such as Aweber, in order to connect your optin form to the list database.

You deliver the free offer to their inbox. You can also communicate with your email list ongoing to give other free value (content) and upon occasion offers that they would buy (affiliate or your own).

But the idea of the funnel is that the first free product is also connected to larger products and higher price points. This works best if you have your own products or if you really take the time to search out a merchant with a suite of products. So the funnel just means to communicate about or lead people to or give them the opportunity to buy your $30 product, then your $100 product, then your $499 product, then your $2300 product. Price points are just examples. You can charge what you want in that range.

The idea is that you are not selling your $2300 product to a cold audience. If you have people who were truly interested and can be served by your free product and if you deliver or overdeliver, then they are likely to be truly interested in the $30 product as well. And as they go deeper into this relationship with you and are truly helped out by what you are doing, then they have no problem eventually participating in your $2300 product.

Of course there are percentages. Not everyone is going to do the $2300 even in the funnel. A lot do the free, many do the $30, several do the $100, less do the $499, and a handful will do the $2300. Even if you are a marketing/relationship master.

But if you have 10,000 in your email list, then a "handful" of them spending $2300 with you is still pretty awesome, yea?

Check out this training. Inexpensive and informative. How to Build a Badass Sales Funnel

I am also interested to learn more about sales funnel, thanks Jennifer Boyatt for your details information. Is it possible to run the sales funnel without Aweber or any other similar service ?

I agree with Stawrew. Russel Brunson's lastest book "DotCom Secrets" is internet marketing gold. Best book I've read regarding sales funnels,conversions,taking your business online,etc...

Build funnel is a mechanical work, the hard (and most important) part of the job is get quality traffic for your funnel system!

This might be helpful:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...step-step.html

No. You need an autoresponder of some kind.

Free "ad supported," no.

Free trial of a paid service, yes.

+1 For DotCom Secrets. Its a must have book if you want to learn about funnels..

Regardless of the Christmas tree ornaments you may or may not want to hang on your funnel, you will always need three elements.

I described them years ago in this post.

They haven't changed.

And they won't change.

That's because they're independent of any technology you may happen to be using.

Brunson's book is interesting. It is also complex. But what Brunson does that I really like is this--and you can see it right in his homepage video--

He goes back to pencil (OK, charcoal stick) and paper.

And DRAWS the funnel step out.

Does this in the book, too.

Forget the FBI-style cats cradle pin and string design on the backboard.

Focus on the hand drawn funnel elements.

WHY would he do that?

The laptop is nearby. Right beside him. He could be using that. Many flowcharting tools like Visio have been around a long time to help. But instead, there he is carving out funnel diagrams with all the proto-tech fervor of a Chauvet Cave painter.

Why.

Because the funnel steps are independent of the technology used to describe them.

Regardless of whether you happen to use Optimizepress, a ribbon-and-ink typewriter, or smoke signals, you will always require three elements:

Lead Generation System

Qualification System

Closing System.

Not many people have figured out how to execute these steps well.

Some will create an innovation--often unproven as far as results go--within one of these steps, and claim it is the Secret To The Universe And Untold Power. I think you know where you can find these.

Few understand the whole thing. They will lie and say they do, but they do not. Be cautious.

Even fewer actually have it systemized and in a package for you to buy.

How will you bring people into your funnel?

That is the first step.

How well you execute the lead generation element boils down to how good your traffic source is.

You can succeed with low and high quality source of traffic. BUT--

If you load your funnel with an unqualified source of leads (sometimes we call these SOLO ADS, or random traffic through your signature link, for instance), where is the stress point in your funnel in this case? It has to do a lot of work next, doesn't it. Those who are not qualified to buy your offer need to be separated from those who are qualified to buy. But we'll get to this in a moment.

If you can find a highly pre-qualified traffic source, now you can get a little excited. You can advertise within an established and paid-for newsletter going straight to buyers of farm products, and you're selling a differentiated farm product? I might have to give you a High Five. You would be using your brain in this case.

Qualification is Step Two.

Remember, this is independent of any technology you are using.

We got traffic. It may be good and it may be poor quality, which means the leads entering into the funnel may be unqualified or pre-qualified to a greater or lesser degree.

When you begin, you don't really know.

Oh, there are promises. Especially if you're buying traffic. But you don't truly know until you run some leads through your funnel and see what happens at this middle step we're at now.

Which, by the way, is a step I have seen even experienced marketers miss OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

They go straight from Lead Generation to Closing and utterly bypass this middle step.

Meaning that their funnel has only two steps, and must do all the work of qualifying and closing in a single leap.

How well do you think it will accomplish its goal with this arrangement?

How well do you think you can see what is going on, and make adjustments, with this arrangement?

If you try to jump from Leadgen to Closing in one step, you keep what is going on obscured.

"To manage we must measure." It's an Operations Management maxim (one of my fields of study.) If you can't measure what's happening, you can't manage it.

And many, many marketers have set up their funnel so they can't measure what's really happening.

Oh, they'll sell you their "funnel"...but it's broken. Too bad they don't know it and can't tell you that.

So this mid-step. Qualification.

You are filtering here: your leads, separating those who are qualified to see your offer from those who are not.

Wait--isn't EVERYONE qualified to see your offer?

Nope.

No Ma'am, No Sir.


You bring in a bunch of random traffic and show them all your offer and many aren't even in the ballpark to need, want, afford your product or service...and what happens to your statistics? Things like EPCs?

Oh sure, I understand--you're new and you just want to make a sale, darn it.

So you bought somebody's "system", set it all up and threw some blind traffic at it--and then wondered why there was only a trickle of interest, a few clicks but no buys, and you can practically hear that fizzle sound as the little flame extinguishes that was your entrepreneurial fire?

"Ha ha." That's Nelson, from The Simpsons. Pointing at y-o-u.

So listen up.

You NEED that middle step. The one people don't know about. Or gloss over.

Qualification.

Whether you want it or not. Whether you feel you're fancy enough to need it or not. You need it.

Throwing unqualified traffic at an offer is a pretty lousy funnel.

It's going to take way too many leads to convert into a sale.

It's broken.

And no gimmick you buy for $7.99 is going to fix that for you.

A gimmick is not a funnel. It is not a step of the funnel. It is merely a temporary, technology-dependent element of one of these three necessary steps.

Once you have separated out the people who should not be there from those who should, you now have qualified traffic. (Yay!)

THIS you can send to your offer.

This is the Closing System.

When people run leads straight to the offer, they have made a huge mistake. Can you see this now?

This is a step I am frequently paid to fix for companies.

I can share it here because no one will read it and even fewer will take action on it. But it helps me to write this stuff down and clarify it for my own understanding.


Lead Generation >>> Qualification >>> Closing.

And even after you set this up, you have one more big job to do.

You see, when you build a house, even if it gets inspected as it does by professionals, people still have to LIVE THERE after the construction is done. And they're going to find little things. Things that don't work. And maybe sometimes they're not so little.

Like there's something weird with the plumbing.

Or the kitchen smoke alarm goes off when someone's cooking with oil (boy is that common).

Or the finishing carpenters were dancing through in a rush because it was getting real close to 3:00 and they wanted to go for beers, and the result was the trim on the kitchen cabinets getting nailed on at "Not Quite 90 Degrees Ugly."

Same with your funnel.

So you set it up.

It's a shell.

A body.

Now you have to run blood through it.

Traffic.

REAL PEOPLE.

The house needs residents.

And from this, you will get actual results.

"To manage we must measure." Remember that?

You need to learn your numbers.

I don't care what was promised to you by the funnel creator. They're not in YOUR market. They're not bringing in YOUR leads. They don't have YOUR copy.

You will iterate your own numbers.

But the fact is, and it's a sad fact, that most people do not know their numbers. They really have no idea what their funnel numbers are, and what those number targets actually need to be.

This is the true difference between the amateur and the professional.

The amateur sets up a funnel they copied from elsewhere, without understanding what is involved and why. They throw some traffic at it, without knowing the numbers, and get some kind of result.

Can you see how random this is?

How completely out of touch with reality the amateur is? Yes, they have SOME greater chance of success if they luck into a good seller who really does have a proven funnel--but there are so many unknown and uncontrolled elements.

What if the traffic source is poor?

The greatest funnel in the world won't make up for that deficiency. It will take lots and lots of traffic loaded into the front of the funnel to produce sales down the line.

And that's only one issue.

What if they missed the Qualification step, as so many do?

How on earth can you measure the effectiveness of your Lead Generation system then??

Think about it!

You send traffic straight to the offer.

What did you learn?

Where's the constraint in the flow of the process?

What do you have to fix?

There's NO WAY YOU CAN KNOW!

Is it the lead source?

No way to tell.

Is it the sales copy?

No way to tell.

So the amateur starts changing everything.

EVERY variable they can think of.

So...when it comes to a science experiment, can you think back to high school for a moment? Can you remember how many variables you were told to change at a time for a science experiment to be valid?

Here's the answer, for those who can't recall...

One!

If, my newbie friend, you rush out and change the traffic source, and the copy, and the color of the page, and the images, and your VSL, and gosh knows what else all at once, without leaving time for new numbers to accumulate so you can measure what happened from the change of one variable...

...how can you know what it was that you changed that worked?!

And this, right here, is why I almost never work with newbies anymore.

Panic.

Nervous Nelly-itis.

No resources to test.

No time to wait.

No stomach for short term loss.


Yup, I'm a big meanie.

But I wrote all this up so you could understand.

So go buy your fancy funnel.

Try to implement it.

I'm sure there'll be something good in there.

I'm just not certain what it is.

And we don't have time to test. Because you're in a rush to make a buck.

The steps might be good. They might even be in the right order. And heck, you may have been given "proven copy" to...um..copy.

Even with all that, you still have to plug in your own traffic source.

You still have to watch your numbers.

If your leads are high in number but your qualified leads are low after they run through that second step, what does that tell you?

If your qualified leads are pretty close in number to your incoming leads from the first step, what does THAT tell you?

And if your sales from qualified leads are low, what do you learn about your offer in that case?

I hope you will at least take away some understanding of how a funnel really works...and that it is independent of technology used. I hope that you will think about funnels differently. And that you will begin to learn where to look to spot the true source of problems.

Thankfully, there are only three steps.